American Rose by Karen Abbott

Author:Karen Abbott
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780679604563
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2010-12-27T23:00:00+00:00

Mayor Jimmy Walker might not have made it to his office in City Hall on the day of February 12, 1931, but that night he was among a thousand patrons congratulating Billy Minsky on the new Republic Theatre. Men in tuxedos and women in evening gowns clustered inside the lobby, praising one another’s fine looks, exposing their necks for a squirt of perfume, wondering what they might expect from a production entitled Fanny Fortsin from France, thankful that this odd little venue, with its downtown roots and bourgeois ambition, offered a respite, no matter how brief, from what the world had become.

They watched the horizontal coochers strut to the end of the runways, spacing themselves evenly under the lights. Slowly, gently, as if preparing for bedtime, the girls lay down on their backs and then executed moves never before seen on a Broadway stage: a shimmying and grinding and thrusting of hips that evoked, equally, sexual intercourse and an epileptic seizure. It was daring and brilliant and raw, and the audience was rapt, motionless, unsure if they should laugh or applaud or try, futilely, to avert their eyes. Billy anticipated the critics’ responses—the usual ho-hum complaints about the humorless comedy, the raunchiness of the stripteasers, the heavy, sea-lion waddle of the chorus girls—but his audience recognized the show for what it was: entertainment for a fair price, with the appropriate mood for a specific time; a show meant not for the Broadway of old but for the Broadway of the Depression. “The only trouble with the performances,” confessed writer L. Sprague de Camp, “was that, when time came to go, standing up presented a problem.”

The Republic was at full capacity every night, as many people turned away as admitted, half of them representing the city’s political and cultural elite, the other half its most weary and desperate. “In the unnatural blaze of lights over Times Square marquees at eight in the morning,” wrote critic Alfred Kazin, “there were already lines of men waiting outside the burlesque houses … people sat glued together in a strange suspension, not exactly aware of each other, but depending on each other’s presence.” The legitimate producers seethed, watching their rightful slice of New York invaded by swarms of the undesired and the uncouth, and Billy, at every opportunity, claimed another inch for himself.

Directly across the street, Earl Carroll presented a new edition of Vanities, his long-running “dazzling and superabundant revue,” this time with a twist: in Murder at the Vanities, a young woman is killed backstage in the midst of a conventional musical. It was a curious amalgamation of comedy and mystery, with the occasional “nasty innuendo” and parade of “Minsky-ized” beauties, and Billy responded by dangling a two-story banner from the Republic’s roof that read SLAUGHTER AT MINSKY’S. Earl Carroll was not amused.

Neither was George White, the esteemed producer who had discovered Ethel Merman, W. C. Fields, and the Three Stooges. White always took the same route to work, and one afternoon, Billy stood directly in his path.

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